Engines of Destruction td-103 Read online

  Engines of Destruction

  ( The Destroyer - 103 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  In the wake of several dangerous railroad accidents where a masked samurai swordsman is seen repeatedly, Dr. Harold Smith sends his associates Remo Williams and Master Chiun to pose as DOT investigators.

  Destroyer 103: Engines of Destruction

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Nobody knew when it all started, because it had been going on since the days of Casey Jones. Nobody thought it unusual, because it was as common as a caboose. No one knew when it would end, because as long as man set hurtling engines on ribbons of steel rail, derailments were inevitable. And no one saw a sinister pattern emerge in the waves of rail accidents, because from the earliest days of steam locomotives there had always been rail accidents. Some years there were more. Some years less.

  For three unrelenting years there were more. Many more.

  Rail fans, train crews and transportation experts alike said the nation's aging rail system was approaching critical mass.

  The National Transportation Safety Board blamed engineers on drugs, aging and downgraded tracks, poor maintenance and just plain dumb-ass bad luck.

  Everyone agreed that Amtrak was experiencing the worst of the rash of derailments. In three grim years more than one hundred Amtrak passengers had died-more combined fatalities than the nation's passenger rail service had suffered since its inception twenty-five years before.

  The fact that Amtrak's cars were filled with passengers, while freight handlers hauled inert commodities, was ignored. As was the fact that the average passenger train hauled a lot more passengers that the average passenger jet. Naturally a train wreck could be more deadly than a plane crash. But they never were. More people walked away from train crashes than died. Nobody could say the same when a 747 cratered. Yet whenever an Amtrak train careened off its rails, it made the front page, not the third section. They weren't hauling cabbages, after all.

  The experts all agreed that if you took Amtrak out of the statistical loop, rail traffic was as safe as it ever had been.

  Which, if you knew the history of rail, had a lot to do with where you sat.

  TY HURLEY SAT in the cab of a new Southern Pacific MK5000C freight hauler, his left hand on the throttle, his right goosing the independent brake as he chased the twin uncatchable gleams of starlight racing ahead of him along a curving stretch of rail approaching Big Sandy, Texas.

  The cab vibrated to the deep baritone thunder of the twenty-five-ton Caterpillar 3612 diesel while Ty watched the brake pressure and RPM readouts seesaw on the liquid-crystal display screen buried in the cream-colored molded plastic of the instrument panel. Not twenty feet at his back, under four toiling, yellow-bladed exhaust fans, five thousand horses galloped in concert, but it felt wrong. All wrong.

  Ty Hurley hadn't become an engineer to sit in climate-controlled comfort, sucking down polyurethane smell, insulated from the big four-stroke monster-block V-12 prime mover he controlled through a careful balancing of power and braking. This was not railroading. This was not his dream.

  He missed the industrial black control panel of his old SD40-2 diesel, with its analog dials and ineffective wall fan laboring to circulate the stale cab air. That was railroading. Ty might as well have been flying the space shuttle as this overengineered appliance. But most of all, he was going to miss being an SP hogger. Southern Pacific had been absorbed by Union Pacific, and his red-nosed gray MK5000C would soon wear UP Cascade green livery. It was the end of an era.

  The only things that remained the same were the two uncatchable gleams on the matched steel rails.

  Ty had been chasing those gleams all his life, man and boy. Ever since he'd first heard the lonesome wail of a thundering redball freight as it raced toward destinations far, far from Texas.

  It had been a good, satisfying life for a man who had never seen the big cities of the East or done much to distinguish himself. He hadn't ever "wiped the throttle"-floored an engine--but he hadn't torn up any track or spilled a load, either. Not on a dozen years on the SP. It was something to brag about, especially these days.

  As he adjusted the brake pressure, coming to the big truss-and-timber-pile bridge that crossed the Sabine River, Ty tried counting his blessings.

  He was thirty-six and in good health. He had a job. It was the job he'd always wanted. True, the work wasn't exactly how Ty had envisioned it back in the small town of Wichita Falls, but it paid well, and the fringe benefits kept the little wife content and the twins in Nintendo and Snickers bars.

  He would probably get used to the MK5000C in time. Maybe, Ty reflected, he would haul freight long enough to see the day when it, too, would become outmoded. Hell, already they were saying the next thing big was AC. An AC monster block wouldn't birds-nest if you ran it flat out by mistake. Ty had never birds-nested an engine, either. Another blessing on the tote board of life.

  Most of all, Ty wasn't his poor daddy. His father had worked the SP before him. A good man, now creased of face and broken of heart and spirit.

  One day Luther Hurley was highballing down the main line when a bright yellow school bus had trundled crossways onto a crossing and got hung up on the track. Tearing around a long bend in the line, trying to make up time, Luther had seen the stalled bus only at the last. He threw the brake too late. But he could have thrown it five miles back and it would have been too late. Luther Hurley had been pulling seventy double-stacked flatcars rattling behind his bicentennial-liveried MP15 diesel. He couldn't have stopped that hurtling dragon of steel in time if he'd found a way to throw it onto its side like a Brahma bull.

  The brake key broke in his hand as, screaming, Luther had plowed smack into the school bus, dragging it squealing and sparking for over a mile along unforgiving tracks.

  He was the only one to survive-if you could call the way Luther Hurley lived after that awful day a life. The rescue boys had to pry his hand off the blaring horn, and when they finally did, they realized he had been screaming all along.

  Ty Hurley never heard the story directly from his father, who went home that day, never to ride the rails again. A railroad man's pension kept him in beer and Sominex. Ty had read all about it in the newspapers the next day. The report had quoted some expert as saying a freight engine hitting a stalled bus was the equivalent of that same bus hitting a stationary Coke can. There was flat out no survivability factor.

  That pithy fact impressed Ty more than the body count, which he had long ago forgotten. It still made him shudder to think about it. And when he came up on a crossing gate, both ends of his digestive system clenched involuntarily.

  No, at least he was not his father, who was strong enough to resist falling into hard drink after his working life ended but was never much good for anything else.

  From where Ty sat, train travel was the safest thing going. As long as you stayed on the train. Get in the train's path and you were track ballast. Ty knew the statistics. In the worst year less than fifty train passengers died en route. Every year at least five hundred died trying to beat hurtling diesel monsters to crossings or trespassing on tracks and hump yards.

  Somewhere past midnight Ty came out of a bend just shy of Big Sandy and grabbed his horn. In town they raised a big old rumpus whenever he did that. Said he woke up the entire town. They never understood it was for their own good. Never connected the warning blast with a twenty-year-old newspaper clipping yellowing in Ty's drawer with his socks and fresh underwear.

  For as long as he had any say, Ty would sound his air horn good and loud when approaching a crossing.

&
nbsp; And damn anyone who complained. It wasn't just their lives. It was Ty Hurley's, too.

  The MK5000C air horn assaulted the Texas night, sounding muffled inside the new cab. Just to be safe, Ty gave it another hoot.

  He saw the bone white sport utility vehicle bump and jounce toward the diamond of crossing tracks where the former Southern Pacific line intersected Union Pacific iron, and his heart thumped like a drum, making the big veins in his hands pulse and his tongue go dry.

  "Oh, dear Lord, please don't ...." he muttered thickly. He hit the horn again.

  In response the sport vehicle surged ahead.

  "No, you dad-burn fool. No, you can't win. Back away, back away!" Ty screamed in the soundproof womb of the big hauler, knowing he couldn't be heard by anyone but his savior.

  The lights of the sport vehicle were two mothy fans making the crossing glow spectrally. The gates began dropping in response to the automatic signal. A bell commenced clanging.

  And Ty changed his tune.

  "Hurry up. Damn it, hurry up! You can do it. Floor that sucker."

  The gates were winning, and Ty's heart started to drop down his gullet.

  It mounted again when the sport vehicle suddenly accelerated and smashed into the gate.

  Ty watched it with eyes growing wide.

  The sport machine bounced its front tires over the rails and, when its rear set hit iron, it stopped dead.

  "Get out! Get out!" Ty screamed, one fist punishing the plastic moulding until it cracked like an egg.

  The bone white door flew open, and a figure stepped out. Pinned by the glare of TMK5000C's big cyclops headlight, he looked like a little bug. His actions were not buglike.

  He had what looked like a long stick in his hands. He jammed it into a tie. It quivered upright like a bug's feeler.

  Turning, he climbed awkwardly to the car's roof, reached down and plucked up his stick. Then he stood up. He just stood there facing the onrushing gray monster diesel with its blunt scarlet nose.

  "Jesus Loving Christ!" Ty moaned, shifting the reverser key into neutral. Simultaneously he hauled back on the throttle, initiating dynamic braking. Instantly the traction motors were transformed. They became individual generators, straining to inhibit thousands of tons of headlong inertia.

  Ty knew it was too late. He knew it was in the hands of God Almighty. All he could do was clutch his controls and stare at the unavoidable disaster in which he would be an unwilling and impotent participant.

  He had heard of people committing suicide by lying down on the rails. It happened back East once or twice. They still talked about a Connecticut Yankee who just laid his idiot head down on CSX tracks and let the cruel steel trucks do for him what he hadn't the nerve to do with a bullet.

  But this-

  The man stood against the night, all in black. That was all Ty could make out. He wore black. Even his face looked black. Not the black of a black man but the ebony of a beetle's wings. It was as if Ty Hurley's worst nightmare had taken the shape of a man stepped out of Hell to bedevil him.

  Before Ty's eyes he grew and grew, and despite the revulsion climbing his gorge, even with the image of a crushed-flat Coke can searing his imagination, Ty looked deep into that black face, into the eyes he could not see, trying to make out the features that would any second be smashed beyond recognition, wondering if that was what his poor silver-haired daddy had done. Wondering if he had seen the fearstunned little faces, the whites of their small round eyes in that awful protracted moment before the bus was busted open like a loaf of Wonder bread, scattering childish bodies like so much sunflower seed.

  Suddenly the man lifted his arms. His hands were together, holding his stick. In the blackness Ty Hurley could not make out what it was, but the image that jumped into his mind was of a sword lifted high and defiant, as if the man in black were some fearless warrior of old determined to defeat a modern freight train with a thin blade of steel.

  In that heart-stopping instant of time, Ty Hurley prayed for the man. Prayed because he knew that of the two of them, only Ty would survive.

  As the baritone-voiced beast bored toward him, the man laid the sword across one shoulder and seemed to be taking practice swings, like a ball player. He was real casual about it.

  At the last possible second, the man cocked and let fly. The blade caught a sliver of moonlight, and Ty saw it, too, was black. Leaving his hands, it pinwheeled up as if in slow motion. Ty's eyes went to it even as his brain said, He's chickened out. He's gonna jump clear. Thank God. Thank God Almighty.

  Then the whirling blade was coming at his windscreen like a furious helicopter blade, and below his line of sight the fragile utility vehicle exploded in a fireball that instantly scorched the blunt Action red nose black. And without any shudder of contact or any loss of momentum, the thirty-car freight slammed the broken thing along.

  A few miles down the line, it got so twisted up it just fell apart. The pieces that were not flung aside were flattened into the track.

  Ty Hurley saw and heard none of that. His hands were frozen-one on the reverser key, the other on the air horn.

  His eyes were open and they were looking up, blinking uncomprehendingly. He was staring at a work boot. He didn't know whose boot it was, but it looked familiar, very familiar. It looked just like the boot he had laced up this morning, as a matter of fact.

  Then the train leaned into a turn. Ty's head rolled slightly, and he could see the boot was his own. He could see himself sitting firm and unshakable at the controls of the monster hauler, and in the final moments before the darkness closed in, he wondered if he were having some kind of out-of-body experience.

  For he saw that his uniform collar was very red, and where his head should have been was a curious kind of void in which arterial red blood fountained.

  He had a curious thought, too: If I'm up there, what are my eyeballs doing on the floor?

  That was the exact moment the blood finished draining out of his brain, and all life oozed away from his severed head, extinguishing that final, ridiculous, unanswered thought.

  Without a conscious brain at the controls, the big MK5000C roared on through the night, swaying through the turns, blind and unstoppable, the heavy work boot of its dead engineer holding down the deadman pedal. Microprocessor controls kept the power from exceeding load-hauling tolerances. It rattled through Big Sandy, Texas, and on up to Texarkana, where it naturally ran out of track and piled into the big steel bumpers at the end of the line, with predictable results.

  WHEN NTSB INVESTIGATOR Melvis Cupper reached the scene, the yard-crew foreman had one word for him.

  "Birds-nested."

  "So why didn't the engineer just brake that sucker?"

  "I wasn't referring to the engine. We haven't cracked the damn cowl yet. I meant the engineer. He's the birds-nested one."

  When he climbed into the big MK5000C cab, now lying on its side like a fallen war elephant in the mess that had been the freight yard, Melvis understood what they meant.

  The damn engineer was all over the cab. The impact had flung him every which way, including apart. Fingers had snapped off. One leg was twisted all the way around and jammed up behind one shoulder. The opposite leg looked normal at first. The foot was pointed in the correct direction, but the exposed calf above it had been wrenched around at least three times. It looked like a twist of white taffy.

  Worst off all, his head had been torn off his neck.

  "Jesus," Melvis muttered.

  "Looks like flying glass lopped it clean off."

  Melvis speared his flashlight ray all around. "I don't see much loose glass."

  "Well, there must be some. Feller's decapitated, ain't he?"

  "That's a fact," Melvis admitted.

  But the only glass present in the cab were a few splinters from the spiderwebbed window ports, the biggest of which was smaller than a fingernail.

  "It's possible the big hunk of glass that got him broke apart in the crash," Melvis allowed. />
  "Which crash? The one back at Big Sandy or this mess right here?"

  "Gotta be this one here. He only hit a Nishitsu Ninja. Damn flimsy little Jap jeep ain't no match for a roaring juggernaut like the MK5000C. Hell, the tallest part of the radio aerial wouldn't even reach up to the headlight."

  "Reckon that makes sense, when you put it like that."

  It was the only thing that did make sense.

  Then the foreman had a thought. "If busted glass didn't get him on impact, why the hell did he ride her all the way in like he did? He had near to fifty damn miles to brake."

  Melvis shrugged. "Maybe he froze at the controls. It happens."

  "Nobody freezes for fifty miles and then plows into the freight yard, full tilt like he done."

  "Well, it's for sure he didn't lose his head at the crossing," Melvis grunted. "Plumb contrary to nature is what that notion is."

  But when they backtracked to the initial impact site, they found a solitary sliver of glass that looked as if it had come off an MK5000C.

  Melvis ordered the window glass reassembled, and the sliver fit exactly. There was no getting around it. The engineer had been decapitated at the crossing.

  "His foot should have slipped off the deadman pedal," the yard foreman said. "How do you explain it?"

  "Dope," said Melvis Cupper.

  "You NTSB boys are all the time sayin' dope when you can't find a reasonable explanation."

  "Dope," Melvis said flatly.

  It went into his preliminary report as drugs, and the report was dutifully logged into an NTSB computer in Washington, D.C., where it was archived for access by NTSB offices nationwide.

  The clerk typist who performed that simple action did more to facilitate a serious investigation of the mystery of the Texarkana disaster than any field investigator. No one suspected this-any more than they suspected the three-year reign of rail terror was no string of coincidences or run of bad luck.

  There was a pattern. But no one could discern it.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he was test-driving his new wheels under battlefield conditions.